Utah Trip—Spring 2017

So, we’re all returned from a fabulous 8-day trek around the southern Utah parks and monuments, and I’m going to do a blow-by-blow write up along with photos and maps. Let me thank Rick Decker up front for organizing the trip, as well as being a great traveling companion. And Kendall Gelner as well, who joined us in Utah and brought along his wife’s Jeep Cherokee to help shuttle us into areas that would have been relatively inaccessible by car (although mountain bikes would have been great!).

Rick and I flew into Las Vegas and met at the car rental area. We grabbed a car, headed to a local Starbucks, and then went over a couple of different itineraries that Rick had written up. One thing I want to mention is how great it is to have a guide with local knowledge. Rick was driving around this entire area like it was his backyard (knowing stores, coffee shops, etc)—and he’s from Hawaii. He does come out west often though, and it shows with his ability to navigate pretty much anywhere we needed to go. So—the itineraries were ambitious, and had us starting out at Death Valley and areas west shooting some dunes (which is awesome). Sadly for us, the southern California deserts are in beautiful bloom this year, and we couldn’t get a room. This pretty much destroyed the itineraries, so we began to improvise immediately. We decided on spending a day or two (or three, as it ended up) in Zion, and we would work our way to Moab to meet Kendall on Sunday. We had no reservations, so we’d play it by ear as we ambled from town to town.

So, we jumped in the car and drove to Springdale (1 on the map)(, which is right south of Zion National Park. It’s a really cute resort town. We got a place to stay for three nights, and settled in for some shooting. From Zion we travelled to Escalante (2) to spend an afternoon and morning shooting in that area. From there, we drove through Bryce (no stops) to Torrey, (3) to spend a night. There we shot areas in Capitol Reef—an awesome place that I had not been to. We left Sunday morning to head to Moab (4), meeting up with Kendall, and shooting outside of Arches and inside of Canyonlands. The reason we didn’t do more Arches? The main road was under construction, and they had a 7am-7pm limitation on the hours you could be in the park. For photographers who want to do sunrise and sunset, this didn’t work particularly well. Canyonlands is just a few miles farther from Moab—it lived up to it’s name—it was the first time I’ve seen that area.

So, with that introduction, I’ll start to build the posts that illustrate the trip! Stay tuned!! And be patient, I’ve got a lot of images to process. I’m going to write this more as a chronological travelog with photography liberally sprinkled in; if you follow along you’ll get a sense of what we saw, in the order we saw it… This blog has all the text and context around the images, but if you want to see full sized image galleries, you can click over to Utah Galleries.